NOTES for Eph 1:16-17

What the apostle Paul prays about? In fact that we may know God, grow in His knowledge. But for this knowledge, we have to change beforehand spiritually, accept «the spirit of wisdom and revelation", that is agree with the fact that knowing God is not of our strength, but can be the consequence of His auto-unveiling to us. Therefore, it is a prayer for our openness and humility.

It is interesting thereupon that Paul calls God the God of our Lord Jesus-Christ, recognizing that our God isn’t Someone known by our efforts, but the One, Who Christ declared (Jn. 1:18).

Continuing his discussion of God's new people, Paul defines them as the “body of Christ” (v. 23). In saying this, the apostle undoubtedly drew on the view traditional in his time that the Jewish people were a single spiritual body, united by God through the Temple sacrifices and the Torah. For Paul, it is clear that God's new people become a single spiritual body through their unity with the risen Christ, who bears within Himself the fullness of the Kingdom's life, made accessible through Him to each of His followers. The apostle understands very well that the very same power of God which restored to life the Messiah who died on the cross is truly at work in every Christian (vv. 19–20). It is the presence of this power that makes a Christian a Christian in the original sense of the word: an inhabitant of the Kingdom whose nearness the Savior proclaimed during His earthly ministry.

Evidently, for Paul the very nature of the Kingdom is bound up with this power. It is certainly no accident that he mentions the breath of God, through which the faithful gain wisdom and receive revelation (vv. 17–18). This is the same breath of God that pervades the Kingdom. It can evidently sometimes reveal itself to one seeking the Kingdom as a power that changes the person and transfigures human nature itself, making it fit, once transfigured, for life in the Kingdom. But power apparently remains power only as long as the seeker looks at the Kingdom from outside. To those still outside the Kingdom, Christ's resurrection must have appeared precisely as an act of God's power, of which it was the result. For those who have already entered the Kingdom and see the same events from within, power becomes God's breath. It not only envelops a person from outside but also penetrates within, becoming an inseparable part of that person's own human nature to the extent that it has already been transfigured. Thus the life of the Kingdom enters the human heart, and the person becomes an inhabitant of the Kingdom.

Paul calls the Church the body of Christ, defining it as "the fullness of the one who fills all in all." Here, as can be seen, he follows traditional Jewish ideas about the people of God as one spiritual whole, as though one body, which was sanctified as one whole through the worship services that regularly took place in the Jerusalem Temple until its destruction in AD 70.

It was precisely because of this sanctification of the people as one whole that even those believing Jews who could not get to Jerusalem for a feast, for example for Pesach or Shavuot, did not feel cut off from God or from their community. They gathered where they lived, in the synagogues of the diaspora, and celebrated together with those who were then in Jerusalem. Paul applies this view to the Church, with the difference that it is sanctified by the presence of the Messiah himself, risen from the dead and abiding at the throne of God.

Of course, the Church is the space of the Kingdom abiding in our world as it is being transformed, though it has not yet been transformed completely. But it is also the space of Christ himself, the space of his personal presence. Certainly, God's presence had been known to the Jewish people before. God revealed himself to them already when the Torah was given at Sinai, revealing himself so that he would no longer be hidden, and his presence accompanied the people throughout their history.

But now the space of those relationships that bind Christ with his heavenly Father has been added to the spiritual space of this presence. The Kingdom unfolds within these relationships; it is revealed in them and through them. Their fullness is what fills "all in all." And Christianity means being included in this fullness of relationship between the Father and the Son. This kind of inclusion can be called true incorporation into the Church in the proper sense of the word, while everything else in church life is only a means for solving this main task. That is, if we are speaking precisely about the Church with a capital C.

If we read the apostle Paul's words carefully, we discover something strange. Paul says that the Church is not simply Christ's Body—an image familiar to us—but His fullness! He who fills all in all, the source of every fullness, willed that the Church should become necessary to Him, that it should become His fullness. In other words, the Lord loved the Church so much that, without it, He Himself would, as it were, lose His fullness: out of love He made Himself dependent on human beings.

What does this dependence consist in? In the fact that, after the Ascension, Jesus' bodily presence on earth—that is, His fullness, since He is truly human and would be incomplete without a body—is realized only through the Church. This concerns, first and foremost, the sacrament of the Eucharist, in which He is bodily present. But the Church is also His body, and this means that every member of the Church embodies His presence in the world.

The first chapter of the Apostle Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians, including today’s passage, consists of several very long sentences. They are so long that understanding them takes considerable concentration. We find a detailed and logically ordered account of God’s saving deeds, beginning with the words: ‘Blessed be God… who…’. This is not the Apostle Paul’s individual style: he is perfectly capable of expressing himself clearly and with the brevity of an aphorism. Rather, it is a feature of the genre, if that term is applicable here: the genre of thanksgiving prayer, which includes a blessing of God the Father for having saved us in Christ, for the way He has done so, and for how this is manifested in the particular people taking part in such a prayer of thanksgiving. We are speaking, of course, of the prayer of the sacrament of the Eucharist. Among other things, it is of immense importance to us that the logic, structure and content of the blessing quoted by the Apostle Paul are essentially no different from those of the corresponding prayer that we say in our churches today. The Apostle writes these words in his letter because grateful contemplation of God’s great and glorious deeds accomplished for our salvation is a unique source of life for all Christians, from his original readers to us and until the end of time.